Reading in a larger Group

The teacher and the children sang Baby Beluga while the teacher held the book and turned the pages. When they were through, the teacher complimented the children on their singing. She then told all of the children to go to sleep. The children nestled down on their carpet pieces, and the teacher said, “On the count of three, B awaken and use the potty.” She did this for each of the children. When all the children returned, she asked them to choose a book. They chose Looking for a Moose. When the teacher read about the “bulgy-nosed,” O touched his own nose and extended it out with the motions of his hands as if to make it “bulgy.” As the teacher read, the children got more excited about seeing the moose. “I see one!” shouted B as he ran up to the book to point it out. “Let’s count the mooses,” R said. They counted in unison to 4. B said that it was a “google moose.” When asked to clarify, B said that it was “a moose with a lot of mooses.” O said, “A google is a number.” His dad told him that. The class counted again in unison with the teacher to 33. The teacher asked, “How many?” The students shouted, “33!” The teacher then suggested that the children count as high as “we can.” The children got to 26 as a group. According to Isbell and Raines, “music is an essential experience for young children” (p. 183). In this case, the children are singing along with the teacher. They are employing the vocabulary of the Baby Beluga book in a way that is easily accessible to them. With Looking for Moose, the children are using numbers and counting the moose they see out loud. This mathematical activity is also based in language comprehension using the words that represent the numbers they see.